Reposting this piece to PROVE the LIE of "sectarianism" and who is responsible for it.
The third in a series of brilliant pieces from Anne Barnard of the Boston Globe (when the AmeriKan MSM was still worth something).
See: Memory Hole: The Dream Vacation
Memory Hole: Sistani's Reach
This article puts the absolute lie to the 'sectarianism" of Muslims that is propagated throughout the Zionist-controlled AmeriKan MSM.
It is a shame that the link doesn't provide the photo of Imam Hussein (that accompanied the newspaper clipping) in the photo gallery, which I INSIST you view!
Readers, why does the U.S. want to bomb and destroy them?
What BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE!!!!
Caption of missing photo: "An image of Imam Hussein hangs in dowbntown Tehran. The death of Hussein at the battle of Karbala in 680 AD, marking the rift between Shi'ite and Sunni Muslims, is commemorated by the Shi'ites in the religious ceremony of Ashura."
Description: A beautifully-colored banner hangs lit above a crowded street at night. What would appear to be "Christmas lights" are dangling in front of the image of Imam Hussein, who is bearded and young-looking with a green turban and gold helmet (with feather plume).
Take it from me, Muslim artworks and exhibits are INCREDIBLY BEAUTIFUL and COLORFUL!
And I didn't see any articles about the Ashura in this year's War Dailies.
See what I mean, readers? Papers are worse than even a year ago.
Doesn't help to make people human when you are about to -- to use Hitlery Clinton's term -- OBLITERATE them!
"Across the divide"
Iran, in its effort to become a regional and global power, is reaching out across the Sunni-Shi'ite divide, exhorting Muslims worldwide to tolerate their differences -- and march under one Islamic banner.
TEHRAN -- Hamid Almolhoda, deputy director of the Center for Rapprochement of Islamic Schools of Thought, wears the white turban of a Shi'ite Muslim cleric. His budget comes from the world's only Shi'ite theocracy, the Iranian government, better known for bristling revolutionary rhetoric than for sunny public outreach. But Almolhoda's message of brotherhood wouldn't sound out of place at an ecumenical church breakfast.
His mission, approved at the highest levels of the Iranian government, is to convince the world's Muslims that the increasingly violent divide between Sunnis and Shi'ites -- on lurid display in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East -- is no big deal, just a matter of minor theological differences.
"Let's cooperate on what we have in common," he says. "Regarding our differences of opinion, we can tolerate each other."
In a campaign that is little-noticed in the West, Iran is trying to convince Sunni Muslims that Shi'ism, the form of Islam practiced by 90 percent of Iranians but only 20 percent of Muslims worldwide, is not the heresy that many Sunni hard-liners have branded it, nor a dangerous subversion of their faith, but just another legitimate school of thought within a unified Islam.
That mission has been a constant for Iran for half a century. In the 1950s, Shi'ite scholars sought Sunni recognition; in 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini presented the country's Islamic revolution as a pan-Islamic, not a Shi'ite, movement. But the mission took on new urgency after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 unleashed a sectarian power struggle in Iraq and beyond.
The Center for Rapprochement began as a private group under Iran's monarchy in 1960, but has been reborn in recent years, with the blessing of Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as a vehicle of strategic outreach for the Islamic Republic. The center's call for tolerance between sects advocates a flexible approach to Islam, a potential antidote to the rhetoric of Sunni extremists -- including Al Qaeda and its offshoots in Iraq -- who condemn Shi'ites as heretics who deserve to die for their beliefs.
The ecumenical message may not be for domestic consumption in Iran, where Shi'ite scholars exercise control over religious practice and daily life for Sunnis and Shi'ites alike. But the center's scholars have written dozens of books stressing that Sunnis and Shi'ites believe in one God, one Koran, one Mecca. They have distributed more than 90,000 copies of its books at international book fairs, many of them in post-Saddam Iraq. Cultural attaches in Iranian embassies promote their ideas abroad.
The campaign has a double-edged purpose, analysts say. Not only does Iran, as the world's largest majority-Shi'ite country, have an urgent interest in combating extremists and easing Sunni suspicions of resurgent Shi'ism in Iraq. Iran also sees an opportunity to reassert its leadership of the Muslim world. To edge out Sunni extremists, Iran wants to seize back the mantle of global jihad from Al Qaeda and the Sunni militant groups in Iraq who have attracted angry young Muslims from around the world, stealing the thunder of Khomeini's vow to export Iran's 1979 revolution.
Iran wants to dominate the Middle East in a more traditional political sense, too; it wants recognition as a burgeoning regional power, a power to be consulted on diplomatic and economic issues. And in a broader effort to increase its international power and prestige through public diplomacy, Iran aspires to win admirers as far away as Africa and Indonesia -- to emerge not only as a Muslim power but as a Third World leader.
"The reason Iranians are investing so much [in ecumenical outreach] is not religious; it's a key strategic interest," said Vali Nasr, a senior adjunct fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of "The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam will Shape the Future."
"Iran is making a new bid to be the hegemon of the region," Nasr said. "The more influence and support you have beyond your borders, the more legitimate your power is."
Last month, the Rapprochement Center held a conference in Tehran titled "The Culture of Islamic Resistance." It invited people from 28 countries, including Khaled Meshaal, the Damascus-based leader of Hamas. But no Iraqi militants were invited. Instead, they were branded takfiris, a name for Sunni extremists who target Shi'ites and others they consider blasphemers.
"Unfortunately, the resistance in Iraq has been contaminated by takfiris," Ayatollah Mohammad Ali Taskhiri, the elderly head of the center, told reporters. He praised "martyrdom" that targets Israelis or American "occupiers," but condemned "takfiri martyrdom" -- suicide bombers who kill Shi'ite civilians by the hundreds in Iraq. Those groups have no right to call themselves holy warriors and instead play into the hands of those who would divide Muslims, like Israel and America, he said. Instead, he pointedly called Tehran "the center of resistance."
Usually, though, the center strikes a conciliatory note, downplaying the differences that some Sunnis and Shi'ites consider matters of life and death -- differences that date to the 7th century and the violent struggle for leadership of the nascent Muslim community following the death of the Prophet Mohammed. Shi'ites believe Mohammed's son-in-law Ali and his son Hussein were the rightful leaders and still mourn their deaths. In the Middle East, the split plays out today largely in power struggles between Saudi Arabia, which dominates the Sunni world, and Iran, the principal Shi'ite power; and within countries like Iraq, which is 60 percent Shi'ite.
The Rapprochement Center, whose name is also sometimes translated as the World Association for the Proximity of Islamic Schools of Thought, was founded by Ayatollah Mohammed Ali Boroujerdi, a traditionalist Iranian cleric who cooperated with Iran's monarchy, and Sheikh Mahmoud Shaltout, then the grand mufti of Al-Azhar University in Cairo, one of the world's most widely respected centers of Sunni thought.
Their central argument was that Shi'ism was the fifth Islamic school of thought, the Jaafari school -- just another variation on the four main Sunni schools of thought that are roughly equivalent to different Christian denominations. They ruled that a Sunni may become a Shi'ite without any repercussions, and vice versa.
Though Sunni and Shi'ite clerics banded together to survive under secular autocrats like Iran's shahs and Egypt's Gamal Nasser, by the time of the 1979 Iranian revolution, the center was dormant. It reopened in 1990 -- now under government control -- to heal rifts from the long and costly Iran-Iraq war, with its sectarian overtones.
The center publishes lists of hadiths, or sayings of the Prophet, that are deemed legitimate by scholars of both sects. It calls on governments to allow Muslims to follow any legitimate Islamic school. It notes that a Sunni may accept and follow the ruling of a Shi'ite cleric -- for instance, Iran's ruling clerics -- and still consider himself a Sunni. And it preaches that no Muslim should ever declare another Muslim a heretic, echoing a ruling issued by a conference of Sunni and Shi'ite clerics in Jordan in 2005 at the urging of Iraq's Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.
"Our vision is to form a union of Islamic countries, like the European Union. One currency, an economic union," Almolhoda, the deputy director, said. "If we have a union like that we won't have any more tragedies like Iraq and Afghanistan. That's why we promote the Islamic revolution as an Islamic revolution, and not a Shi'ite revolution."
Ahmad Mobalevi, a young, turbaned scholar who runs the Rapprochement Center's research office in the shrine city of Qom, says the goal is to get Sunnis and Shi'ites to work together to navigate modernity and globalization "for the welfare of Muslims" without accepting "Americanization."
The farther one gets from the Middle East, the cradle of the Sunni-Shi'ite split, the easier it is for Iran to sell itself as a leader for all the disenfranchised. Where Shi'ites are a tiny minority, they are perceived as less of a threat. Some of the most fruitful outreach has been in Africa, where there are just 250,000 Shi'ites among 200 million Muslims, and Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim nation with 200 million people, overwhelmingly Sunni.
Almolhoda's wall is decorated with an animal pelt painted with the words "Islamic Center, Jakarta," a memento of his good-will visit to Indonesia. Last year, Iran's firebrand president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was photographed there clasping his hands over his head like a prizefighter after giving an anti-colonialist speech to cheering students. By contrast, Jordan's King Abdullah has described him as the leader of a dangerously ascendant "Shi'ite crescent."
African states initially wary of Iran warmed to the country once it started downplaying revolution and emphasizing pan-Islamism and anti-colonialism, said Aryeh Oded, an Israeli scholar of Africa-Middle East relations. Iran now has 21 ambassadors in Africa and 11 black African countries have embassies in Tehran -- the poorest ones, like Gambia's, fully funded by the Iranian government -- and has enjoyed support from some of those countries in the UN Security Council.
The center funds the University of Schools of Islamic Thought, in Tehran, where one-third of the 400 students are Sunni. Most of the Sunnis are from Iran's Turkmen or Kurdish minorities or from Afghanistan. A requirement to speak Farsi, Iran's main language, limits recruiting opportunities in the Arab world. But students from Central Asia, Syria, and Lebanon have attended free of charge.
The dean of the school, Abdelkarim Biyazar Shirazi, said Sunnis and Shi'ites will learn tolerance through increased contact. "It's a divine blessing that we have different opinions," he said, "a source of renewal, of evolution."
The school's education director, Ahmed Zahani, wants his students to be "ambassadors of peace and friendship." As for the takfiris, he said, "We are baffled....God has created us to live, not to kill."
With its chief rival, Iraq, in chaos, and the United States mired in counterinsurgency wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran has been emboldened on the world stage -- most dramatically in its standoff with the United States and Europe over its alleged nuclear weapons program.
Yet even if Iran's global outreach across the sectarian divide is an old-fashioned power play, it may point to a missed opportunity for the United States to engage with Iran on a matter of paramount common concern: namely, the threat of Sunni extremism, including Al Qaeda and its allies.
For Nasr, at the Council on Foreign Relations, the failure of the United States to enlist Iran's help against Sunni extremists in Iraq -- who kill more Americans and Iraqi civilians than any other militants -- was a "strategic mistake." Instead, the Bush administration branded Iran as a member of an "axis of evil," even though, Nasr said, "the takfiris present a far bigger threat." If one's priority is fighting terrorism, Iran's militant proxy, Hezbollah, focused on territorial disputes with Israel, is less dangerous than the takfiri groups, which plan unpredictable, nonconventional attacks on the United States and its Arab allies.
Nevertheless, US officials refused to speak with Iranian counterparts about Iraq until last week, when they agreed to meet Iranian officials in Baghdad to discuss stabilizing the country. And Iran, rebuffed after helping the United States in Afghanistan, has sought instead to find common ground with Sunnis in a struggle against a common enemy -- the United States. That effort meets fertile ground in the Middle East, where many believe America is bent on dividing and conquering Muslims.
Shmuel Bar, director of studies at the Institute of Policy and Strategy in Herzliya, Israel, believes the Rapprochement Center's real goal is to export Iran's revolution. "A powerful tool for the recruitment of Sunnis," Bar calls it, part of what Iran sees as its "manifest destiny to lead the Muslim world."
But Nasr says that Iran's goals are more straightforward, and perhaps more achievable, than that -- driven less by its revolutionary ideology than by a desire for allies, whatever their stripe.
"It wants to be recognized as a regional power, like India in South Asia," he said. Given the new realities on the ground, that ambition may be well within its grasp. "The reality is that Iran, out of the Iraq war, has come out stronger than before."
Also see:
Occupation Iraq: Israelis Killing U.S. Troops
Occupation Iraq: Israeli-Trained Death Squads
Prop 101: Al-CIA-Duh and the OSI
Prop 101: Al-CIA-Duh's Greatest Hits
Prop 101: The "Terrorism" Business
Prop 102: Iraq and Government Lies
Al-CIA-Duh
Who Invented "Al-CIA-Duh?"
"Al-CIA-Duhs" Catch-and-Release Program
Asymmetrical Warfare Group
Operation Gladio
Operation Northwoods
Occupation Iraq: British Bombers
Occupation Iraq: America's Roadside Bombs
Salvador Option
Special Police Commandos
Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group
Prop 201 tutorial
FRU
Islam's 9/11
How much more evidence do you need, readers?
